Marche du Soramo - Outdoor market selling local specialties

When the weather is fine, I sometimes go out during lunch time and stroll in downtown. Between the old building and the new building of Entetsu Department Store, there is a space called Soramo, Marche du Soramo is an outdoor market held there several times in a month. There you can buy fresh vegetables, tea, hand-made sweets and foods from local farms, as well as flowers, handicrafts, and some fancy goods.

Today, I found canola with flowers and some other edible plants on a long table. They looked so similar that I couldn’t distinguish them very well, though their names were presented in front of them. The farmer who sold them explained one by one and how to eat them.

As for canola flowers, he recommended me to eat them by adding sesame after boiling. He said that he had eaten it as an appetizer when he traveled to China. I got interested in it and bought a pack of canola. This is what I had for dinner, boiled canola flavored with soy sauce and ground sesame. It is difficult to explain the taste of canola, but it had a pronounced flavor of a vigorous plant. “That’s why I like vegetarian diet“, I thought.

From the same farmer in the market, I bought also colorful tomatoes and cauliflore, a new type of cauliflower. The farmer said that they cultivate 12 colors of tomatoes and sell them to restaurants and a cruise ship.

Cauliflore was the most interesting vegetable I saw at the market. I had eaten just white cauliflower before, but cauliflore on sale were violet, yellow, greenish yellow, and white. With these, I also made soup for dinner.

In the soup, there were also onion, potato, and brussels sprouts. They were cooked with water and soya milk, and the soup was flavored with salt and hard tips of shiitake mushroom (taken out later). In addition, I used almond powder. Vegetables in Marche du Soramo are sold at a reasonable price, but you can make rich soup with them.